61–70 of 218 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that's exactly my point - yes you need to prove beyond a doubt that YOU are the right one to buy from, because it's so easy for 3 Stanford dropouts in a trenchcoat to make a seemingly successful business in just a few days of vibecoding.
> 3 stanford dropouts in a trenchcoat I'm using this
What I get from the article is that, proving that a company will stick around for a while after you’ve subscribed is hard now, because anybody can AI generate the general vibe of the marketing department of a big established player. This seems like it’ll be devastating for companies whose business model requires signing new users up for ongoing subscriptions. Maybe it could lead to a resurgence of the business model…
We already got your money, what do we need to work for again?
Doesn't matter. We must keep building more and more technology no matter the cost. Have an idea for a business? Build it. Does your business make the lives of people worse? Doesn't matter, keep pushing. Could some new technology ruin the lives and relationships that people have? Doesn't matter, just build it. We always need more, need to do more. Every experiment is valid, every impulse must be followed. More complex…
Turns out the Torment Nexus was just democratizing Venture Capital's desire for infinite growth.
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens fame [0], has a great quote (paraphrasing): Interviewer: How will humans deal with the avalanche of fake information that AI could bring? YNH: The way humans have always dealt with fake information: by building institutions we trust to provide accurate information. This is not a new phenomenon btw. In democracies, this is often either the government (e.g. the Bureau of Labor Statistics) or…
The problem is that too many people just don't know how to weigh different probabilities of correctness against each other. The NYT is wrong 5% of the time - I'll believe this random person I just saw on TikTok because I've never heard of them ever being wrong; I've heard many stories about doctors being wrong - I'll listen to RFK; scientific models could be wrong, so I'll bet on climate change being not real etc.
I once went to a school that had complementary subscriptions. The first time I sat down to read one there was an article excoriating President Bush about hurricane Katrina. The entire article was a glib expansion of an expert opinion who was just some history teacher who said that it was “worse than the battle of Antietam” for America. No expertise in climate. No expertise in disaster response. No discussion of facts. “Area man says Bush sucks!” would have been just as intellectually rigorous. I put the paper back on the shelf and have never looked at one since.
Don’t get emotionally attached to content farms.
AI-esque blog post about how infinite AI content is awful, from "a co-founder at Paid, which is the first and only monetization and billing system for AI Agents".
So I can't have opinions? Also, this is entirely hand-written ;)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
build things """"people"""" want
People want dopamine hints, gamification, addictive distractions, and a culture of competitive perma-hustle. If they didn't, we wouldn't be having these problems. The problem isn't AI, it's how marketing has eaten everything. So everyone is always pitching, looking for a competitive advantage, "telling their story", and "building their brand." You can't "build trust" if your primary motivation is to sell stuff to you…
That assumes people have the ability to choose not to do these things, and that they can't be manipulated or coerced into doing them against their will.
If you believe that advertising, especially data-driven personalised and targeted advertising, is essentially way of hacking someone's mind to do things it doesn't actually want to do, then it becomes fairly obvious that it's not entirely the individual's fault.
If adverts are 'Buy Acme widgets!' they're relatively easy to resist. When the advert is 'onion2k, as a man in his 40s who writes code and enjoys video games, maybe you spend too much time on HN, and you're a bit overweight, so you should buy Acme widgets!' it calls for people to be constantly vigilant, and that's too much to expect. When people get trapped by an advert that's been designed to push all their buttons, the reasonable position is that the advertiser should take some of the responsibility for that.
I needed to get some builder quotes for my home. It did not enter my mind to go online to search for any. I just reached out to my family for any trustworthy builders they've had, and struck up conversations with some of my fancier neighbors for any recommendations. (I came to the conclusion that all builders are cowboys, and I might as well just try doing some of this myself via youtube videos) Using the internet to…
When we needed some work done, we asked family and friends too, and ended up with a cowboy. When the work needed to be re-done, we looked up local reviews for contractors, and ended up with someone who was more expensive but also much more competent, and the work was done to a higher standard.
How do you know that? Or is it just that your bias is coybows are bad and so you assume someone who dresses and acts better is better?
Now step back, I'm not asking you personally, but the general person. It is possible that you have the knowledge and skills to do the job and so you know how to inspect it to ensure it was done right. However the average person doesn't have those skills and so won't know the well dressed person who does a bad job that looks good from the poorly dressed person who does a good job but doesn't look as good.
One such example was call centers. In the 2000s implementing a call center in India was all the rage on cost cutting. The customer experience was terrible and suddenly having a US-based call center (the thing companies just abandoned) was now a feature.
I think we’ll see similar things with AI. Everyone will get flooded with AI slop. Folks will get annoyed and suddenly interacting with a real human or a real human writing original content will be a “feature” that folks flock to.